EPISODE 83---“Don’t Listen to Phil Hellmuth,” Dusty “Leatherass” Schmidt

Dusty “Leatherass” Schmidt is one of the real success stories of online poker. He’s the “Average Joe” who started playing micro-stakes games and eventually turned that into millions of dollars and a sponsorship deal with PokerStars. In his first book, “Treat Your Poker Like a Business,” Schmidt revealed some of the secrets to becoming an internet success story and laid out the blueprint for how micro- and small-stakes players could follow in his footsteps.

Coming off the acclaim of his first book, Schmidt teamed up with Christopher Hoppe to write his second book, “Don’t Listen to Phil Hellmuth,” which claims to correct the 50 worst pieces of poker advice you’ve ever heard. The book is available for $49.99 either as a hard copy or a PDF file that can be loaded onto most popular e-reading devices.

The concept of the book is pretty provocative and clearly the title was meant to stir the pot and create a bit of controversy. For a book being sold strictly online, there’s some leeway when it comes to self-promotional methods, so I can’t come down too hard on the shameless attempt to grab headlines through the title alone.

Nevertheless, as a player who plays small-stakes games and looking to make the jump into mid-stakes games by the end of this year, I find myself agreeing with the concept of the book more and more: the advice we all heard when we first jumped into poker is woefully outdated. The books aims to take that advice and give it a real world spin.

The books starts with an unapologetic look at the advice of years gone by from poker commentators on television and instructors on websites. The tone of the book is much more analytical than anything else, which was a good move since a book with a bratty and spiteful tone would have lost a lot of readers. The introduction sets the tone well and demonstrates the reality that poker is an organic game that is constantly evolving.

The book consists of 50 chapters, each of which has a common misconception in the game of poker. Each chapter states the misconception and then deconstructs the truth and falsehood behind it while demonstrating its reality in today’s micro- and small-stakes games. Each chapter is about four pages long and most have hand history examples if the concept calls for one.

I’m sure there will be plenty of debate regarding the advice, but the idea is that the mind will be thinking about interesting poker spots. There’s a real world look at the games in the context of each misconception and there’s definitely bound to be some nuggets of golden advice for all readers in the 50 chapters in the book.

The book isn’t necessarily linear, meaning the chapters don’t have to be read in order to make sense. If you find some of the misconceptions particularly juicy from the table of contents, skipping to them is appropriate and doesn’t take away from the experience of reading the book.

The second part of the book is a section entitled “25 Hands with Dusty Schmidt,” where the authors take a look at hands from the mid- and high-stakes cash games and break down the play. There are a lot of interesting spots that Schmidt played and there’s a strong emphasis on playing back at an opponent type and range. Again, there’s bound to be discussion about the lines Schmidt took and the summaries given.

After about 80 pages encompassing those hand histories, the final part of the book is the “Study” section, which contains a 27-page, 60-question quiz. The answers to the quiz are given on the last page so you can check.

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